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Is Newt Gingrich Wrong to Talk About Sharia?

A response to Lee Smith, who says that the former House speaker is wrong to mention sharia, since it is a “hopelessly abstract concept” and an “Orientalist fantasy.”

by
Raymond Ibrahim

Bio

August 24, 2010 - 12:03 am
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Smith continues:

When Gingrich argues that “radical Islamists want to impose Sharia on all of us,” I can’t imagine how he sees that happening, short of the largest land invasion in human history of foreign Muslim soldiers. … The stealth scenario is slightly less preposterous — jihadis insinuating their way through our legal and political systems to slowly Islamize a credulous U.S. public degree by degree — but many times more repugnant. It is necessarily premised on the idea of a United States that has lost all faith and confidence in its own values and an intellectual and political elite too stupid to tell the difference between our founding principles and Islamic obscurantism.

First, Gingrich’s point that “radical Islamists want to impose Sharia on all of us” is perfectly valid, as it deals with intention, not necessarily capacity, though Islamist chances obviously increase when we ignore the threat they pose (through, say, semantic quibbling). As for Smith’s “repugnancy” towards the efficacy of the “stealth scenario,” he seems to overlook how the vicissitudes of time and chance are apt to slowly and subtly alter the face of society.

Consider how radically changed Western society has already become in comparison to earlier generations. Couple this with the fact that the whole point of the stealth jihad is to operate slowly, eroding Western values chip by chip; that today’s predominant philosophies of postmodernism (“there are no absolute rights or wrongs”) and multiculturalism (“no one way is better than the other”) are especially conducive to the introduction of Muslim mores in society — and “the largest land invasion in human history of foreign Muslim soldiers” may not be necessary.

Just as the old timers of previous generations marvel agape at what is today deemed acceptable (or unacceptable), years from now, you too may well wonder — how did it come to this? Yet such is the way of time: small concessions today lead to great, and often unexpected, changes tomorrow. And such is the way of the stealth jihad.

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Raymond Ibrahim, author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (Regnery, April, 2013) is a Middle East and Islam specialist, and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
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